Well shit. You’ve got to be kidding me. I just spent five minutes cleaning off the muddy paws of one of the dogs I’m taking care of so she could come inside. She’d been whining incessantly, and although I tried telling her, “You’ll just have to wait until they air dry,” she wasn’t having any of it. So I grabbed an old towel and thoroughly wiped down each one of her paws. All four of them. The whole time, she was gnawing on my arm as if it were a ham bone. I suppose for her, it was. Thankfully, she just “gummed” me. She didn’t use her teeth. Neither did my grandma, come to think of it, when she chewed (food, not my arm). Of course, Grandma didn’t have teeth.

Er, real ones anyway.

I remember Grandma used to keep her teeth in a porcelain container on her bathroom counter. The lid to the container said “Pearly Whites,” but I honestly think her teeth were less luminescent than pearls and more subdued like like a dish rag. But what false-teeth-container company is going to label their product “Mostly Whites” or “Unremarkable Off-Whites”? Anyway, I can still see the container sitting right there, to the left of the hot water nozzle. I can also see Grandma sitting at the kitchen table in her way-too-thin-for-company nightgown, gumming her Malt-O-Meal without a care in the world, her falsies fifteen feet away in the family bathroom.

Grandma and Grandpa only had one bathroom. Dad says when he was growing up with his older sister, one person would be in the shower, another person would be at the sink, and another person would be on the pot (that’s what they call it, the pot, or ter-let). I’m so private. I can’t imagine. Although I remember being at Grandma and Grandpa’s as a kid and seeing Grandma sitting on the ter-let. Because nobody ever closed the crapper door in that damn house. Modesty? What’s that?

Although I went to Fort Smith this afternoon to see my chiropractor (a friend of mine used to always call them “choir-practors”), I’ve spent most of the day reading. This morning it was about the four beings that make up The Sphinx–the bull, the lion, the eagle, and the man–and how these can be related to 1) the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water), 2) the four evangelists (Luke, John, Mark, and Matthew), 3) the four suites in a deck of cards (spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts), and 4) the four fixed signs of the zodiac (Taurus, Leo, Scorpius, and Aquarius). The point being that in terms of one’s personality or spirituality, rather than picking one extreme over another, the goal is to synthesize your various parts and bring them together as one. Like a sphinx. Or if you pictured yourself as a circle, rather than living from one particular point along the edge, the goal would be to live out of the center, your center.

This afternoon and evening I got caught up in a book about improv comedy. I picked it up randomly, if anything in life is random, and, oddly enough, it also talked about synthesis. That is, it discussed long-form improv, a style sometimes called The Harold. As opposed to short-form improv, The Harold’s success comes from the big picture. For example, a group of actors might start a scene, then another scene, and then another. Then they’d go back to the first scene, the second, and so on, except this time, the scenes would begin to blend as the actors “make connections” to scenes already started. Despite the fact that each scene starts off unrelated, a larger, overarching narrative eventually emerges.

The contention of the book is that connections just happen, that we’re wired to look for them and make them, and that we’re doing this all the time. On stage, off stage, doesn’t matter. I suppose it was what my friend’s dog was trying to do earlier when she was gnawing my arm–connect. Oh, I never said why was so irritated. I spent all that time wiping her off to let her in, then after being inside for exactly two minutes, she wanted back out. So I let her out. Then she wanted back in. So I let her in.

I swear. Some people can’t make up their minds.

Now my friend’s dog is lying on the kitchen floor, just a few feet away from me. I wonder if she has ANY idea how dirty it is. Probably, since she brought in the dirt. Regardless, she clearly doesn’t care, the way Grandma didn’t care if anyone saw her sitting on the pot. Ugh, that was so embarrassing. Even now, I could just crawl in a hole and die thinking about it. That being said, it’s what my friends have always like about my family. Not that we (well, some of us) don’t shut the door to the bathroom, but that we’re not hyper modest. My friend Bonnie says we’re “spicy.” Because we leave our false teeth on the bathroom counter. Because we talk about sex at the dinner table. Because we use the word fuck.

Later tonight, if all goes as planned, I’m going to the gym with my dad. And whereas I exercise when I go to the gym, I call what my dad does “The Ronnie Coker Social Hour.” Seriously, the man’s never met a stranger. I see hot guys and just gawk–but my dad talks to them. He says, “When I was your age, I looked exactly like you. Now I weigh three hundred pounds. So watch what you eat.” Two weeks ago he apparently asked some Jesus-loving stud-muffin (the guy shared his testimony) if he could make his “boobs dance” for my aunt. “That would really charge her battery,” he said. And get this shit. The guy did it.

Last week when I was at the gym with my aunt, the guy came up and chatted with her. “It’s good to see you again,” he said.

The idea behind The Harold is that connections will naturally emerge. You don’t have to force them. This is true in writing as well. For example, when I sat down tonight I didn’t know what to talk about. But I tried another improv technique–beginning in the middle. Instead of saying, “Today started when I woke up,” I began with the present moment. I just cleaned the dog’s paws. Then I simply went down the rabbit hole. One thing led to another, and things began connecting, the way my dad does when he goes to the gym. I imagine it’s so easy for him to do this because he grew up in a house with an open-bathroom-door policy. There, I’m sure, he learned that life is anything but pearly white, and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. So why wouldn’t you talk to strangers? After all, everyone wants to be around people who can let their hair down. Or take their teeth out. (Or make their boobs dance.) We all want to connect.